Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

To Phoenix and back again. We left Wednesday morning for the greater Phoenix area to work on a group art project that Wayne's professor invited him to participate in. 240 pictures and over 1200 seconds of sound clips later, we came home. That's the essence of our week.

Before we left, we worked like mad: Wayne had to finish finals and a project for the upcoming Box Show at Gallery OneTen, I had to finish my contributions to a paper a professor and I submitted yesterday. We also managed to watch New York Doll Monday evening and hang out with some neighbors Sunday evening for a last minute dinner. Tuesday was spent spray painting an image on CDs and burning some images (that was the Box show project) and packing. Oh, and printing off some directions from MapQuest. [We could talk for a long time about the film New York Doll; needless to say, we highly recommend it to ALL viewers.]

But MapQuest failed us yet again. When will we learn?? We should verify directions with another map engine...so we don't end up at Zion's National Park entrance, and face a decision to either pay $20 bucks to drive through the park, or turn around and backtrack 25 miles (which makes a 50 mile addition to our trip). We opted to backtrack. The project has some funding, but the funds we will be reimbursed are not unlimited, and we had hopes of still reaching our campgrounds at a reasonable hour.

It all would have worked out fine, except that we didn't plan gas stops to account for those 50 extra miles, and had to make another 20 mile detour to Tuba City - middle o' nowhere Arizona - just to make sure we didn't run out of gas before Flagstaff. In the end, the fatal MapQuest mistake cost us about an hour of our time. And thus we got to the campground 20 minutes after sunset. It's a bit tricky pitching a tent in at unfamiliar campsite in the dark, when your flashlight is out of batteries and you're worried about stepping on fireant hills or scorpions or other pleasant desert creatures. :) [Scorpion stings were my high priority to avoid. -Wayne] It all worked out in the end though. We got our tent up and zipped and were pretty fortunate that it was just us (i.e. no bugs) in our tent. Whew. But next time we'll get a second opinion on the directions. :) [It was really windy that night, but a very starry sky and we left the top of our tent off.]

Thursday we woke up bright and early and hit the road. Wayne was assigned the southwest corner of the greater Phoenix area to take pictures, and I was in charge of recording interesting sounds. [This is Rebecca's first chance to be on the artists listing for a project.] We headed first to the Indian reservation on our map, and found some interesting things. The type of camera Wayne was using is meant to capture "movement" pictures, so it was a bit disappointing that we couldn't find people to photograph, but I think we found some interesting shots anyway. That is, until a guy in a big white vehicle told us to "stay on the road." [I had told him what our project was and how we were trying to show the wonderful diversity that is brought by the Native Americans in the area. I asked if I could take his picture and he wasn't happy about that idea either.] We stayed on the road, but interesting shots were harder to come by. Also, we learned that some schools would not let us take pictures of their students without "parental consent." But some would. Go figure. Not surprisingly, we liked the schools that helped us out. :) [None of which on the Indian reservation.]

After leaving the indian reservation, we met some nice people at the YMCA, the 7th day adventist church, and some kids at a bus stop (when Wayne asked them if he could take a picture, he had to ask three times and eventually one of the kids shrugged his shoulders and mouthed the word "whatever." He couldn't even be bothered to voice a response.) We found a skateboarder in an otherwise empty park that showed off a bit for us, lots of dust, construction everywhere, and 19 "dollar" stores (my favorites were the ones that looked like small, brightly painted mexican shops with a big "dollar store" painted on the sign). There were almost more dollar stores than gas stations in our area!

We opted to stay at a hotel Thursday night; after a long day of work we were almost too exhausted to put up at a campground. That was the first place that asked my age (if I were under 17, I would have been free...). The second place was at the casino. Don't you just have to be 18 to go in a casino? We had to go back to our car to get my license; I'm not used to being carded I guess. :)

Friday was a good day. We found a golf course, where one of the guys in charge drove his cart up to us and told us we did things wrong by not signing in, and we weren't supposed to walk on the course without permission, due to liability. We thought we were being kicked off, but when we went to go sign in, they asked what we were doing and gave us a golf cart to drive around FOR FREE! Wheee! Vroom vroom, vroomy vroom vroom! [Everyone at the golf course was really cooperative. I asked a handful of people if I could photograph them for our project and they were really excited about it.] We also found more kids at parks - just when we were beginning to think no one used the parks in Phoenix. By the end of the second day, we didn't get quite as many pictures in, and kept getting boxed in by construction, but we did finish the 10 rolls of film they sent with us. That's a lot of picture taking in a 2-day span of time.

The hotel was a nice break from camping, since we could shower all that desert dust off us, but our room smelt like wet dog. Since wet dog isn't a nice smell to fall asleep to, we camped again our last night in Phoenix. Friday night is a more popular time to camp, so we ended up in the "primitive" campsites. Not bad, just really rocky. We slept just fine, but woke up to a flat tire. Hmm. Not sure if the tire was already leaking air before we got to the campsite or what. But we were certainly glad that the spare was easy to put on, and that we found a Discount Tire place only three exits on the freeway north of us. They were pretty speedy about changing the tire, too. We barely had time to walk to Walmart and pick up some bagels before they finished.

On the way back, we didn't make the mistake of driving through a road that cost 20 bucks. See, we can learn! :) We made incredibly good time, and made it home again by 8:30. And I'll have to check, but I think we were pretty much on budget for the trip too. Yay. Now we start gearing up for spring term; classes start on Tuesday. And I have another phone interview on Tuesday. Hopefully I can find some workplace I'll fit in at soon....